vegan recipes + plant-based living

Hope

June 30, 2012

On Saturday, we left Boston in its bricks for us to come back to when we were done filling ourselves with enough forest. All the work from the last week, the training, the tension, the stress melted away as the stoplights became fewer. Destination: New Hampshire.

We packed our things in the car Sunday morning and laughed as I played with my new camera. Quincy at the drivers seat and me plugging along to tunes. These days I am reveling in some of the moments gone unplanned. The seconds and hours where I do not have to think of what I will become, but get the opportunity to focus on what I am.

We made a last minute decision to hike Cannon Mountain for the day. With a backpack filled with vegan snacks and trails to blaze we headed up to the peak. At the top we chose a different route to come down. This is where the Old Man in the Mountain used to be, a rock outcropping where tourists would come visit. The Old Man and the tourists are no longer there, but the mountain still is.

The birch, the mushroom caps, and the creeks alive with summer. There is so much hope in mountains. The trees growing into one another and the clean air washing out our lungs.

I took too many pictures of the mushrooms while we were on the trail. I think there is something beautiful about them. They are the one thing brave enough to grow in the strangest of spaces. Not afraid to admit to themselves that they need something to help them grow every now and then.

They are simple. They come from dirt and the ash of old trees. We can learn a lot from them, at least I think we can. I think we can learn from a lot of things, but I’m not quite sure of anything these days. I just know when I find myself driving back into Boston I will be reminded that I have to figure out what to do next, where to move, where to work, who to love.

Standing in my apartment. Cleaning out a dirty backpack. Legs still stiff from a tough hike. I will just manage to be for a second. To let myself exist in the moment of being here, wherever this is, listening to myself without judging my thoughts.

I think now that there is so much hope you can take away from the mountain. You just have to be still enough to hear it.